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I get asked a lot why Cisco doesn’t have feature X, or support hardware Y in their UCS product line. A recent discussion with a coworker reminded me that lots of those questions are out there, so I might as well give my opinion on them.

Disclaimer : I don’t work for Cisco, I don’t speak for Cisco, these are just my random musings about the various questions I hear.

Why doesn’t Cisco have non-Intel blades, like AMD or RISC-type architectures? Are they going to in the future?

As of today, Intel processors (the Xeon 5500/5600, 6500/7500 families) represent the core (pun intended) of the x86 processor market. Sure, even Intel has other lines (Atom, for one), and AMD still makes competitive processors, but most benchmarks and analysts (except for those employed by other vendors) agree that Intel is the current king. AMD has leapfrogged Intel in the past, and may do so again in the future, but for right now – Intel is where it’s at.

If you look at this from a cost-to-engineer perspective, it starts to make sense. It will cost Cisco just as much to develop an AMD-based blade as it does for the more popular and common Intel processors. Cisco may be losing business to customers that prefer AMD, but until they’ve run out of customers on the Intel side of things, it just doesn’t make financial sense to attack the AMD space as well.

As for RISC/Unix type architectures (really, any non-x86 platform), who’s chip would they use? HP? Not likely. IBM? Again, why support a competitor’s architecture – especially one as proprietary as IBM. (Side note – I’m a really big fan of IBM AIX systems, just not in the “blade” market) Roll their own? Why bother? It’s still a question of return on investment. Even if Cisco could convince customers to abandon their existing proprietary architectures for a Cisco proprietary processor, how much business do you really think they’d do? Nowhere near enough to justify the development cost.

Why doesn’t Cisco have Infiniband adapters for their blades? What about the rack-mount servers?

One of the key concepts in UCS is the unified fabric, using only Ethernet as the chassis-to-Fabric Interconnect topology. By eliminating protocol-specific cabling (Fibre Channel, Infiniband, etc), the overall complexity of the environment is reduced and the bandwidth is flexibly allocated between upper (above Ethernet) layer protocols. Instead of having separate cabling and modules for different protocols (a la legacy blade architectures), any protocol needed is encapsulated over Ethernet. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is the first such implemenatation in UCS, but certainly won’t be the last.

Infiniband as a protocol has a number of compelling features for certain applications, so I’d definitely see Cisco supporting RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) in the future. RoCE does for Infiniband what FCoE does for Fibre Channel. The underlying transport is replaced with Ethernet, while keeping the protocol intact. Proponents of Infiniband will point to the transport’s legendary latency characteristics, specifically low and predictable. The UCS unified fabric architecture provides just such an environment – low, predictable latency that’s consistent in both inter- and intra-chassis applications.

As for the rack-mount servers, there’s nothing stopping customers from purchasing and installing their own PCI Infiniband adapters. Cisco isn’t producing one, and won’t directly support it – but rather treats it as a 3rd party device to be supported by that manufacturer.

What about embedded hypervisors?

Another key feature of UCS is that the blades themselves are stateless, at least in theory. No identity (MACs, WWNs, UUIDs, etc), no personality (boot order, BIOS configuration) until one is assigned by the management architecture. Were the blades to have an embedded hypervisor, that statelessness is lost. Even though it’s potentially a very small amount of stateful data (IP address, etc), it’s still there. This is probably the most-likely to be supported question in my list. My expectation is that at some point in the future, the UCS Manager will be able to “push” an embedded hypervisor, along with its configuration, to the blade along with the service profile. By making UCS Manager the true stateful owner of the configuration data, having a “working copy” on the blade becomes less of an issue.

Final thoughts…

I’ve used this analogy in the past, so I’ll repeat it here. I look at UCS as sort of the Macintosh of the server world. It’s a closely controlled set of hardware in order to provide the best possible user experience, at the cost of not supporting some edge-case configurations or feature sets. No, you can’t have Infiniband, or GPUs on the blade, or embedded hypervisors. The fact is that the majority of data center workloads don’t need these features. If you need those features, there are plenty of vendors that provide them. If you want a single vendor for all your servers – regardless of edge-case requirements – there are certainly vendors that provide that (HP, IBM, etc). In my opinion, though, it’s that breadth of those product offering that makes those solutions less attractive. In accommodating for every possible use case, you end up with a very complex architecture. Cisco UCS is streamlined to provide the best possible experience for the bulk of data center workloads. Cisco doesn’t need to be, or want to be as near as I can tell, an “everything to everybody” solution. Pick something you can do really, really well and do it better than anyone else. Let the “other guys” work on the edge cases. Yes – that will cost Cisco some business. Believe it or not, despite what the rhetoric on Twitter would have you believe, there’s enough business out there for all of these server vendors. Cisco, even if they’re wildly successful in replacing legacy servers with UCS, isn’t going to run HP or IBM or Dell out of business. They don’t need to. They can make a lot of money, and make a lot of customers very happy, co-existing in the marketplace with these vendors. Cisco provides yet another choice. If it doesn’t meet your needs, don’t buy it. 🙂

No offense or disrespect is intended to my HP and IBM colleagues. You guys make cool gear too, you’re just solving the problems in a different way. Which way is “best”? Well, now, that really comes down to the specific customer doesn’t it?

He just posted another great article on why UCS is his server platform of choice. Before you write him off as just another Cisco fan-boy, definitely take a look at his logic. Even if you have another vendor preference, he presents some excellent points to consider.

A lot of people have been asking me what I think of the recently released Tolly report comparing the bandwidth of the HP and Cisco blade solutions.

The short answer is, I don’t think much of it. It’s technically sound, and the the conclusions it reaches are perfectly reasonable – for the conditions of the tests they performed. In keeping with Tolly’s charter, the tests were repeatable, documented, and indisputable. The problem is, the results of the testing only tell half the story. The *conclusions* they reach, on the other hand, aren’t as defensible.

It’s really not necessary to get into a point by point rebuttal. At least not for me. I’m sure Cisco will be along any minute to do just that.

The facts that Tolly established during the report aren’t groundbreaking or surprising. Essentially, the tests were built to demonstrate the oversubscription of links between UCS chassis and Fabric Interconnects, which Cisco is quite willing to disclose at 2:1. These tests were paired with HP comparisons of blade-to-blade traffic on the same VLAN, which in HP architectures keeps the traffic local to the chassis. The interesting thing there is that if the traffic were between the same blades but in different VLANs, the Cisco and HP solutions would have performed identically (assuming the same aggregation-layer architecture). What makes that interesting is that the Tolly report’s figures depend on a specific configuration and test scenario – the Cisco values won’t change (or get any worse) no matter how you change the variables. The HP values will vary widely.

And that, my friends, is where I see the true benefit of Cisco’s architecture. Change the conditions of the test repeatedly, and you’ll get the same results.

I’m not faulting Tolly in this case. Not at all. They were asked to test a certain set of conditions, and did so thoroughly and presumably accurately. It’s just that you can’t take that set of data and use it to make any kind of useful comparison between the platforms. The real world is much more complicated than a strictly controlled set of test objectives. Do we really think that HP went to Tolly and asked “We want a fair fight?” Of course not.

Well, it’s official. HP is not going to be a Cisco gold partner any longer.

Given HP and Cisco’s very public competition, I can’t say this is any surprise. While HP certainly has contributed significant sales to Cisco in the past in the form of routing and switching equipment, HP has aggressively moved to position their own products in front of Cisco’s recently (and why wouldn’t they?).

Does anyone think this actually means much for the sales of either company, or more of a “yawn” type move?

Over at By the Bell, there’s a great post and commentary on differences between HP’s offerings and Cisco UCS. As many of the comments point out, the post itself is a bit biased towards UCS, but the comments are an excellent set of discussions about the various pros and cons of the solutions. As good as the post is, the comments (I think) are even better. Check it out!